Local governments in regional Western Australia are scrambling to prepare policies to safeguard food production and communities due to increasing interest in using agricultural land to build renewable energy assets or for carbon offsets.
Australia was one of 196 signatory countries to the 2015 Paris Agreement that includes the goal of reaching net zero emissions or a carbon-neutral economy by 2050.
In 2022, the Albanese government said it would cut Australia’s emissions by 43 per cent on 2005 levels by 2030.
With the push to decarbonise the world’s energy production, regional local governments say they are now seeing an influx of proposals from companies wanting to build renewable energy infrastructure like wind turbines and solar farms or to plant trees for carbon sequestration.
The shire of Moora, 160 kilometres north of Perth, is yet to host a wind or solar farm, but shire president Tracy Lefroy said numerous renewable energy proposals were now taking a lot of her council’s focus.
Ms Lefroy said she saw enormous potential in renewable industries, but needed to ensure any project approved by her local government also delivered lasting community benefit and protected prime agricultural land and water resources.
“We must be really clear that we welcome new industry but that we want a seat at the table when these development processes are going through,” she said.
Goals set, but no policy in place
Ms Lefroy said guidelines over the impact on the land and communities where projects were to be built had not been properly considered.
“To help us understand how we protect our food production, how we ensure national food security, and looking at the fairness to ensure that landowners and communities have reasonable opportunities to engage with the decision-making,” she said.
“This is going to impact on our lives and our businesses.”
Moora is one of five local governments working with the WA Local Government Association (WALGA) to create a land use policy framework to balance the agricultural and energy industries’ interests.
WALGA chair Karen Chappel said managing new land use was “worrying” numerous local governments.
“The scale and the timeframe of renewable energy transition at the moment requires a robust and comprehensive [planning] framework, and that’s not in place,” she said.
“So we are asking for there to be an orderly development of renewable energy facilities because the scale of these projects is large and they’re coming in fast.”
Ms Chappel said the location of new projects must also be considered, and requirements in place to ensure community benefit.
Limiting land locked to trees
Energy giants such as Woodside and Inpex have purchased a number of farming properties in WA’s Wheatbelt, including the Moora Shire, to plant trees for carbon sequestration, offsetting carbon emissions from energy production such as gas in WA’s north.
Ms Lefroy said existing guidelines sometimes lacked “teeth”, and she was hopeful a collective land use policy across WA local governments would ensure local authority.
“There seems to have been, in a couple of projects in regional WA, land use creep where trees were meant to be planted on non-arable non-cropping land,” she said.
“Yet when you look down the line, they have been planted on cropping land.”
In December last year, the Shire of Perenjori finalised a planning policy that limited tree plantings to no more than 35 per cent of a property.
Perenjori Shire president Jude Sutherland said the move was prompted by growing interest from carbon projects in the past 12 months due to the relative affordability of land, particularly in the eastern part of the local government area.
“We have found in the past the management of [tree farms] can be a little difficult,” she said.
“There hasn’t often been a manager in the area so as these trees grow up, there become some issues with pests, weeds, fire management, that sort of thing.”
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